Christ and the Law

Matthew 5:17–20 AV

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Introduction:

I believe that one of the “disconnects” in the Church today is that there has been a radical separation between the law and the Christian.

In fact, I heard about a book written by a professor of law at Harvard University, Harold J. Berman, entitled The Interaction of Law and Religion.

And he developed a very significant thesis.

His thesis in the book is that Western culture has had a massive loss of confidence in law and a massive loss of confidence in religion.

He sees that one of the causes of the radical separation of one from the other, and his conclusion is that you cannot have law, or rules for behavior, without religion, because it is religion that provides the absolute base for morality and law.

Now, that man is not a Christian, but certainly we have to agree with his thesis.

He fears that Western culture is doomed to relativism because of the loss of an absolute.

We have broken away from religion, from the concept of God, from absolute truth, and therefore we are stuck with existential relativism when it comes to making laws.

He says that law and religion will stand together or law and religion will fall together.

Listen, religion-less law could never command authority; there must be a transcendent value, a super-rational absolute.

In his book, he quotes professor Thomas Frank of NYU.

John MacArthur Sermon Archive Christ and the Law, Part 1

“Law has become undisguisedly a pragmatic human process. It is made by men, and it lays no claim to divine origin or eternal validity.”

This leads professor Frank to the view that a judge in a court reaching a decision is not propounding a truth but is rather experimenting in the solution of a problem.

John MacArthur Sermon Archive Christ and the Law, Part 1

“Having broken away from religion,” Frank states, “Law is now characterized by existential relativism. Indeed, it is now generally recognized that no judicial decision is ever final, that the law follows the event, is not eternal or certain, is made by man and is not divine or true.”

Berman goes on to say:

John MacArthur Sermon Archive Christ and the Law, Part 1

“If law is merely an experiment, and if judicial decisions are merely hunches, why should individuals or groups of people observe those legal rules or commands if they do not conform to their own interests?”

What is the purpose of these quotes?

I am trying to tell you this: We are endeavoring, in our society, to have rules without absolutes.

Court after court overturns some other ruling.

When you abandon God and theology, you abandon truth.

Trying to make laws without truth or an ultimate value is impossible.

You cannot build a consistent system on philosophical humanism, a fluctuating, changing principle of what is right and what is wrong.

In a 1979 issue of Esquire Magazine, I am quoting this, not my personal subscription, there is an article written by a man named Peter Steinfels.

The article is entitled The Reasonable right, he says:

John MacArthur Sermon Archive Christ and the Law, Part 1

“How can moral principles be grounded and social institutions ultimately legitimated in the absence of a religiously-based culture?”

The answer is that they cannot.

Some people are hinting at this issue, secular people like Steinfels and Berman and others.

They are hinting at this issue: if there is no absolute truth, and no absolute word, and no God who sets the standard, then there can be no real law.

You will never get people to keep laws that are only judicial guesses.

So, we ask ourselves, “What is the absolute source of truth? Is there an absolute authority?

Is there an unchanging authority, and inviolable law?

And indeed there is and it is no other than the law of God.

God has laid down an absolute, eternal, abiding law; and that is His Word.

John 17:17 AV

Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.

When people in our society are faced with the truth of God’s Word that they do not want to face, they will often times what to chalk that up to the Bible being out of touch with today's society or “that is your interpretation.”

And the problem is that the people who have that attitude about the truth, do not seem to face the reality that perhaps they are out-of-date or they need to be reinterpreted.

“Well, the Bible and all of its laws and regulations do not fit in our society, times are changing,” one person said to me.

But the problem is the opposite; it is not that the Bible does not fit today, but that today does not fit the Bible.

It is today that is wrong, not the Bible.

Jesus says in our text that he did not come to abrogate or annul one whit of it.

Nothing ever changes in the Bible, nothing!

And we will see in our study of this portion that this is Jesus’ view of God’s law.

And, by the way, whatever Jesus thinks of the Bible is what I want to think about the Bible.

I get weary when I hear people say that “well not all of the Bible is true and inspired, there are some things in it that are not inspired.”

But that is what our society does today.

Listen, without an absolute base, there will be no standard of behavior, and we will drift along like the world, without an anchor.

The Scriptures are so important.

The Lord tells us in this passage that we have an absolute, we have an inviolable authority.

He says, “The Bible is absolute. Let it crush your evil ways. Let it overturn your disobedient lives, let it make you face God nose-to-nose and either accept or reject His will and take the consequences.

In this passage, Jesus tells us what He thinks about the Word of God.

And of course, for Him at the time, the Word of God was the OT.

So this is Jesus’ perspective on the Old Testament.

Jesus said very pointedly that He came to fulfill it and that not one jot or tittle will pass way.

But this is not the perspective that is being told by many contemporary preachers.

Here is what none other than Andy Stanley, son of Charles Stanley, had to say:

Video of Andy Stanley.

So, the question that we ask ourselves in light of the context of what Jesus is saying is, “Is the OT binding on the Christian? And if so, how much is binding on the Christian?”

Do we have to fulfill those things?

How important are all those things?

These are vital questions, and I think here that Jesus gives a wonderful answer.

Let me set the scene for you.

Christ appeared in Israel rather suddenly, startlingly, in a dramatic way.

For 30 years He had been there, but no one really knew about Him.

He was living in obscurity in Nazareth, but all of a sudden, at His baptism, He hit the scene.

He came in such a way with the proclamation of the Gospel and His announcement of the Kingdom that it made people listen, and made them wonder, “what kind of ruler is this? What kind of a prophet is this? Was He a revolutionary? He is so different. What is His attitude toward the Mosaic Law?”

You see, the issue was that Jesus did not sound like the Pharisees, and did not sound like the Scribes.

He did not sound like anyone they were hearing in their day, and their natural reaction was to wonder whether he was really an OT prophet or not.

He did not echo the prevailing theology of His day; He refused to identify Himself with any of the sects of His time.

His preaching was so different from that of the Pharisees and scribes that people inclined to think that He intended to subvert the authority of the Word of God and substitute His own.

He threw over all the traditions of men; all the extraneous, legalistic rules, He disregarded.

He kept putting an emphasis on inward morality.

He was a friend of publicans and sinners and all the worse riffraff in the society.

He proclaimed grace and dispensed mercy, and their natural reactions was, “Is this a revolutionary new thing? I mean, He does not sound like the rest of the people that we hear, like the scribes and Pharisees.”

So, they wondered if He was tearing down the OT?

Listen, not only was He not tearing down the OT, but He had a greater commitment to the law of God than the most scrupulous scribe or Pharisee.

He proceeds in this passage to support the authority of the OT.

In a sense, these verses flow out of what has gone before.

In verses 3-12, we have the Beatitudes.

Jesus comes on the scene and in His first sermon He says, “If you are in my Kingdom, this is who you are, this how you act.”

But immediately when you read the Beatitudes, this question comes up in your mind, “I have read them, and it is not easy to be like that. I have read verses 13-16 about being salt and light, and it is not easy to live like that.”

How can we be like that?

How can we live like that?

And the answer comes immediately in verse 17, “You must uphold the Word of God.”

The Word of God, then, becomes our standard for righteousness.

The Word of God gives the guidelines, gives the principles, the requirements.

How can we live out a righteous life, how can we live out the Beatitudes?

Certainly not by lowering the standard.

Certainly not by dropping the law of God and saying that it is not binding anymore.

How can we be salt and light?

How can we be all that we have to be?

By keeping God’s principles of absolute obedience to an absolutely authoritative Word of God.

The Lord introduces the thought here and it is a powerful thought, that the key to a righteous life is keeping the Word of God.

What Jesus says in these verses is absolutely astounding and instructive for us.

Here is the standard by which you live as kingdom citizens and live as salt and light.

The standard is not the perverted way religion twists what God requires, but the standard is the Word of God.

The way to true righteousness is to go beyond the phony externalism of the scribes and Pharisees to an inward righteousness that is only wrought in you by the power of the Word of God.

We want to notice, as Jesus begins to teach on the relationship of the believer to the law, these very important truths about what Jesus said of the law.

I. The Laws Preeminence (vs. 17)

Matthew 5:17 AV

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

When the question arises in the minds of people of whether or not there is absolute truth, the answer is unequivocally “yes!”

And that truth is the law of the eternally sovereign God.

God had laid down His absolute, eternal, abiding law and made it known to men.

And Jesus came and declared that He did not come to teach or practice anything contrary to that law in even the slightest way, but to uphold it entirely.

We live in a day when men have varying ideas of what is right and wrong.

And since men have different ideas of that; one persons interpretation of the Scripture is just as good as another persons.

And there is certainly no place to be dogmatic; to be dogmatic is to be considered uncharitable and intolerant.

And with that idea as the prevailing thought today, they are free to believe or not believe, to follow or not follow as it suits them.

Men are given the chance to come to their own judgment over the Scriptures, and the end result of that most of the time is to disregard the Scriptures.

But you cannot take Jesus seriously if you do not take His word seriously.

It is impossible to believe that Jesus spoke absolute truth and not to consider Scripture to be that absolute truth, because that is precisely what Jesus taught it to be.

Jesus said that he did not come to destroy the law or the prophets.

“Destroy” is “καταλύω” and it means to “to end the effect or the validity of something.”

This is the same word that Jesus used in Matthew 24:2 when He spoke about the destruction of the Temple.

This word, in the Greek, is an infinitive of Purpose.

Meaning that Christ lays out here the purpose of His coming.

And the purpose of His coming was not to end the validity of the law and the prophets.

The Law and the the Prophets represent what we now call the OT, the only written Scripture at the time Jesus preached.

And Jesus quoted from these Scriptures on many occasions.

Matthew 7:12 AV

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

Matthew 22:40 AV

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

It is therefore about the OT that Jesus speaks in Matthew 5:17-20.

Listen, everything that He taught directly in His own ministry, as well as everything He taught through the Apostles, is based on the OT.

It is impossible to to understand or accept the NT apart from the OT.

Jesus said, “do not think...” and that indicates for us that most, if not all, of His hearers had a wrong conception about His teaching.

Most traditionalist Jews considered the rabbinic instructions to be the proper interpretation of the law of Moses, and they concluded that, because Jesus did not scrupulously follow those traditions, He obviously was doing away with the law or relegating it to minor importance.

And because Jesus swept away the traditions of washings, special tithes, extreme Sabbath observance, and other things, the people thought He was thereby overthrowing God’s law.

So from the outset Jesus wanted to correct His hearers of any misconceptions about His view of Scripture.

The text suggests for us three reasons why the Law is Preeminent and why NT believers need to pay attention.

A. It was Authored by God (vs. 17a)

Matthew 5:17 AV

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

By Jesus including the definite article “the” when He spoke of “the Law,” he affirmed that He was talking about the Law of God; the giving of the Ten Commandments.

God was personally the law giver and that is emphasized by the Lord”s usage of the personal pronouns I and Me in Exodus 20:2-6.

And since God is the lawgiver, the author of that law, and since He is does not change it therefore follows that His law does not change.

Malachi 3:6 AV

For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.

This law in a more limited sense is speaking about the Ten Commandments.

But in a more broad sense it is referring to the Torah, the Pentateuch, the first five books of the OT.

The rabbinical system used the term “law” in a reference to their, really, over the top detailed and external requirements that obscured the revealed Word of God with traditions.

Jesus sternly told the Pharisees:

Matthew 15:6 AV

And honour not his father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition.

Jesus said what He said because their traditions were only concerned with external adherence to that law.

Now, keeping the traditions demanded a great deal of effort, but it demanded no heart obedience and no faith in God.

Listen, the fact is that if all we ever have is external adherence to a set of rules not internal love for the one that authored those laws, our external adherence is empty and useless.

God’s law has always required inward and well as outward obedience.

Isaiah 29:13 AV

Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men:

Listen, since the law was authored by God and since God never changes; therefore, his status and commands never change, we need to pay attention to the law.

NT believers do not need to be Antinomians, which defined is “against the law.”

There are many believers that believe, “Hey, the New Covenant has freed me from the responsibility of keeping the laws of the Old Covenant.”

Not at all!

What the New Covenant did was not free you from the responsibility of keeping the Old Covenant, but freed you from the punishment when you do not obey it.

To attempt to throw away a law authored by an unchanging God would be dangerous indeed.

Jesus did not come to end the validity of the law of the immutable God.

The law is Preeminent because it was Authored by God.

B. It was Affirmed by the Prophets (vs. 17b)

Matthew 5:17 AV

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

If you look at the prophets of the OT, all of their warnings, admonitions, and predictions were directly or indirectly based on the Mosaic Law.

The prophets expanded the moral, the judicial, and the ceremonial law.

They spoke on idolatry, adultery, lying, stealing, and all the other Ten Commandments.

They warned the kings, the nobles, and the people in general about keeping the laws God had given for their government, their life-style, and their worship.

Believers need to be very careful that they do not dismiss the OT Law as just something that was for Israel and has nothing to do with the NT Church.

Listen, if it was authored by the unchanging God and affirmed by the Prophets, we need to pay attention.

Again, keep in mind what I said at the beginning; you cannot and will not fulfill verse 3-16 without obedience to the Word of God and that includes the law of God.

We cannot say that we believe that the Bible is the Word of God and then say, “well, I do not have to worry about obeying the law, that is OT.”

Not so…the believer of the New Covenant will be absolutely desirous in obeying all the moral law of God.

So, far from forgetting them because we are New Covenant believers and that it Old Covenant; we need to remember that they are authored by an unchanging God, and affirmed by the Prophets.

C. It is Accomplished by Christ (vs. 17c)

Matthew 5:17 AV

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

The culminating reason for the the Preeminence of the Law is because of its fulfillment by Christ.

Jesus said that He did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.

The point there is not that Jesus came to obey and fulfill the law, which He certainly did, but that He came being its fulfillment.

He did not come simply to teach it fully and exemplify it fully, He was it fully.

He did not come simply to teach righteousness or to model righteousness, He came as divine righteousness.

So far from coming to do away with the law, he came as its fulfillment, He came as the law.

This is a tremendous concept.

Everything in the OT points to Christ.

Jesus says, “I did not come to put an end to the law, I have come to lift if higher than it is today.”

“I am going to reveal the hypocrites. I am, telling you that God’s standard has not changed, no part of sacred Scripture will ever be annulled, I am the fulfillment of it.”

Think with me on this, and this is thrilling.

Jesus was the fulfillment of the Judicial law.

You say, “how so?”

When Jesus died on the cross, that was the final, full rejection of her Messiah, right? That was it.

And that was the end of God dealing with that nation as a nation, the nation of Israel.

The judicial law that He gave to Israel passed away when God no longer dealt with them as a nation anymore and Jesus built the Church.

Someday He will go back and redeem the nation and deal with them again, but for this time the judicial law came to a halt.

There is no more the national people of God.

There would be a new man, cut out of Jews and Gentiles, that would be called the Church.

The judicial law came to an end, Jesus fulfilled it in His death.

But keep in mind that the foundation of the judicial law was in the moral law, so that the divine principles behind it still exists.

Did He fulfill the moral Law?

Yes!

In what way?

Every rule that God ever made, He kept.

Every precept that God ever laid down, He fulfilled.

He never disobeyed anything that God established.

So, He filled up the judicial law in the sense that He brought the whole thing to its ultimate climax.

He allowed Israel to go the way they chose, and they ended their identity as His people at that point, until a future time.

He summed up the judicial law, Israel rejected, and it was over.

Jesus, by living a perfect life, fulfilled the moral law.

What about the ceremonial law?

Well, he fulfilled that as well.

And this is trilling!!

He did it by dying on the cross.

This is the last point and I want to make, and make it good.

He died on a cross, and when He died, the whole ceremonial system came to an end.

He ended the ceremonial system, and we no longer worship God by the blood of bulls and goats.

We no longer go through all the offerings and all of that stuff.

It was only a few years after He died that He allowed the Romans to come in and absolutely destroy the temple.

The whole sacrificial system came crumbling down when He died; it was all over.

The new covenant brought a new dawn, a new day.

The ceremonial system was fulfilled.

Hebrews 7:18 AV

For there is verily a disannulling of the commandment going before for the weakness and unprofitableness thereof.

In other words, what the law could not do, Christ did.

He brought an end to the picture because He was the reality.

Hebrews 8:8 AV

For finding fault with them, he saith, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah:

Hebrews 9:10 AV

Which stood only in meats and drinks, and divers washings, and carnal ordinances, imposed on them until the time of reformation.

What he means by that it is not God’s moral law but God’s ceremonies that have ended.

The point is, all the ceremonies were pictures of Christ, and when the reality came, we no longer needed the picture.

Think of it this way: in every way, Jesus fulfilled the ceremonial system.

And because He fulfilled the whole law, so can you and I.

That is the most amazing part of it all.

Because He was perfectly righteous, because He fulfilled all righteousness, you and I can too.

Romans 8:4 AV

That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

We too can fulfill the God’s moral.

That is the only part that is left.

And if we walk in the Spirit, we can fulfill the moral law.

Because we are in Him and fulfilled the law.

Conclusion:

Let me close by saying this.

Christ alone can give you the absolute standard for your life and cause you to live a righteousness that, of yourself, is impossible.

He alone can enable you to fulfill God’s law and empower you to have the kind of character that He demands.

If you have not, then you can open your heart and let Christ come into your life.

Receive Him as Lord and Savior, that He might fulfilled the law of God through you by His power.